Today's 11-year-old

It’s called the "safe haven law."

In every state you can drop off your infant (under one year) at a hospital and walk away, never to return, and no legal action will be taken against you for abandonment.

Nebraska decided to pass this law back in July, only they forgot to stipulate an age. Actually, they didn’t forget. They thought it’d be a good idea to extend the law to include all minors. So you can actually drop your child off—1 year old or 17 years old—at the hospital and walk (probably run) away.

Well, today an 11-year-old boy was left in an Omaha hospital by his father. He’s the 31st one in the state since the law took effect.

Can you imagine? I heard about this on the radio this morning and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head—an 11-year-old standing alone in a cold hospital hallway knowing that his parents just left him. That they couldn’t love him enough, or fight for him enough, or care enough, to keep him. Or maybe it was that they loved him too much or cared too much and they thought he could be better--do better--somewhere else? But does he know that’s what they were thinking? Who is going to feed him dinner tonight? Where is he going to sleep tonight? He was from Florida, and now he’s in Nebraska. Does he have a coat? It hurts too much to think about these details.

I told a friend recently that sometimes I feel absolutely overwhelmed by all the things and people that I could pray for. I feel bad that I forget to pray sometimes about certain things. And he said he sometimes feels bad that he falls asleep while praying. Yeah, that too! But he suggested that maybe we are to pray about those things that we think about praying for and not stress about the ones we forget. The ones we think about are obviously, truly on our heart.

So, today I’ve been praying for that 11-year-old boy. And I know there’s a trillion gajillion other awful, horrible things going on as I write this, and the people involved in those things could probably use a little praying for too, but for me, today, it’s the abandoned 11-year-old.